Be the Brad!

"Everyone in Hollywood says they wish they could do it like Pixar, but they really don’t. There’s no secret at Pixar, but there is a belief in letting people pursue something with passion and take chances, and most of Hollywood, really, doesn’t like that. It’s too scary." -Brad Bird, writer/director of The Incredibles, seasons and seasons of The Simpsons, and Iron Giant.

Later he says, "If you worry too much about that, you’re just bound to fail. You have to kind of go into stories with a strong sort of “I’m doing this” sort of attitude, or else it comes off as sort of tiptoeing." -Brad Bird. From – Geoff Boucher in Hero Complex.latimes.com


Good advice. It obviously worked for Mr. Brad Bird!

How many times have you been rejected?

The writer of The Help was rejected sixty times before letter #61 said YES. She also lied to her husband and told him she was going on a girls' weekend when, in fact, she was going to a hotel to write.

Best pull quote, "The point is, I can’t tell you how to succeed. But I can tell you how not to: Give in to the shame of being rejected and put your manuscript—or painting, song, voice, dance moves, [insert passion here]—in the coffin that is your bedside drawer and close it for good. I guarantee you that it won’t take you anywhere. Or you could do what this writer did: Give in to your obsession instead.

And if your friends make fun of you for chasing your dream, remember—just lie." This is from Shine.Yahoo.com by MORE magazine.

Read the whole article about her experiences here.

Inconceivable!

"Being realistic is the most commonly traveled road to mediocrity." - Will Smith

From Slacker

"It’s like every choice or decision you make… the thing you choose not to do… fractions off and becomes its own reality, you know… and just goes on from there forever. I mean, it’s like… uh, you know, in the Wizard of Oz… when Dorothy meets the Scarecrow and they do that little dance at that crossroads… and they think about going all those directions… then they end up going in that one direction. I mean, all those other directions, just because they thought about it… became separate realities. They just went on from there and lived the rest of their life. I mean, entirely different movies, but we’ll never see it… because, you know, we’re kind of trapped in this one reality restriction type of thing. Another example would be like back there at the bus station. As I got off the bus, the thought crossed my mind… you know, just for a second, about not taking a cab at all. But, you know, like maybe walking, or bumming a ride or something like that. I’m kind of broke right now. I should’ve done that probably. But, uh, just ‘cause that thought crossed my mind… there now exists at this very second… a whole another reality where I’m at the bus station… and you’re probably giving someone else a ride, you know? I mean, and that reality thinks of itself as this - it thinks of itself as the only reality, you know. I mean, at this very second, I’m in that - I’m back at the bus station just hanging out, you know… probably thumbing through a paper. You know, probably going up to a pay phone. Say this beautiful woman just comes up to me, just starts talking to me, you know? Uh, she ends up offering me a ride, you know. We’re hitting it off. Go play a little pinball. And we go back to her apartment, I mean, she has this great apartment. I move in with her, you know. Say I have a dream some night… that I’m with some strange woman I’ve never met… or I’m living at some place I’ve never seen before. See, that’s just a momentary glimpse into this other reality… that was all created back there at the bus station. You know, shoot. And then, you know… I could have a dream from that reality into this one… that, like, this is my dream from that reality. Of course, that’s kind of like that dream I just had on the bus, you know. The whole cycle type of thing. Man, shit! I should’ve stayed at the bus station."
-Written by Richard Linklater. Opening lines of Slacker.

Excellence.

“Excellence can be obtained if you:
...care more than others think is wise;
...risk more than others think is safe;
...dream more than others think is practical;
...expect more than others think is possible.”

“Excellence is in the details. Give attention to the details and excellence will come.” -Perry Paxton

All You Need Is a Little Cash

It was not lost on me that Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook on a random night in his dorm room and the first chunk of cash was a couple thousand dollars from a friend.
That the thing that pushed it over the hurdle was about $18,000 - which they didn't even use in one fell swoop (as evidenced by the fact that his friend later froze the account.)

All you need is a little cash and - literally I mean a little cash - to get something big started.

And the other moral of the story?
You have to be first.

Quentin Tarantino on “the complete utter payoff of perseverance.”

This is an excerpt from an article in the Telegraph.co.uk by Benjamin Secher Here's the link to the full original article.

"Tarantino’s success as a film-maker did not come easily. “Before Reservoir Dogs, everything was constantly a big build up to a huge let down,” he says. “[Venerated US film critic] Pauline Kael used to say that Hollywood is the only town where people 'can die of encouragement’ and that kind of was my situation.” Tarantino quit school – “the worst institution ever imposed on me” – at 16 and took a job as an usher at “a full-on triple-X porno cinema” called the Pussycat Theatre. He then spent most of his twenties working for the minimum wage at a video rental shop in Manhattan Beach, California, watching obscure films, writing speculative screenplays and figuring out how to become a famous director. “I have always considered that with all the setbacks I had, the fact that I didn’t give up is maybe the one thing in my life that I am most proud of,” he says. “I just knew I would live a life of unfulfilment if I didn’t keep trying.
“So I just kept at it and by the time I wrote Reservoir Dogs it was time. It was time. And then as much as everything else was just this huge build-up to this tremendous let-down, this was…” He pauses, holding the next word in his mouth, relishing the feel of it, “…easy! I wrote the script quickly and we were making the film in, like, seven months.” The movie premiered to acclaim at the 1992 Sundance film festival, securing Tarantino’s reputation, at the age of 29, as one of the most exciting new talents in the business. “It was,” he says, “the complete utter payoff of perseverance.”

And on the flip side to straight up perseverance, here's an article by Richard Walter regarding trying to hit a target by aiming at it. Check it out here.

Terry Rossio on No Permission Filmmaking

"You can not in this town wait for permission. This is the wild wild west. This is a town where if you want to be something you say that you are and you make it happen and then you are that thing."








Among Terry Rossio's credits:
Shrek
Pirates of the Carribean
Men in Black
The Mask of Zorro
National Treasure

"The shell must break before the bird can fly" -Tennyson